{"id":11875,"date":"2012-04-12T12:58:01","date_gmt":"2012-04-12T16:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theredphoenixapl.org\/?p=11875"},"modified":"2012-04-12T12:58:01","modified_gmt":"2012-04-12T16:58:01","slug":"castro-baseball-and-the-thought-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/2012\/04\/castro-baseball-and-the-thought-police\/","title":{"rendered":"Castro, Baseball and the Thought Police"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

by JOHN ESKOW<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou are Free, America, to Do as We Tell You!\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

What a pitiful spectacle. Ozzie Guillen, the hard-partying eccentric who manages the Florida Marlins, sits weeping in the harsh glare of TV lights, forced by his bosses to recant his praise for Fidel Castro. He\u2019s already been punished with a five-game suspension, but the baseball thought-police won\u2019t be placated until he does a literal<\/em> \u201cmea culpa.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

So, in his wonderfully mangled English, he begs forgiveness for saying \u201cI love Fidel Castro\u2026I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that fucker is still here.\u201d But what he really meant, he now says, is ever-so-subtly different: \u201cEverybody in the world hates Fidel Castro, including myself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMea culpa\u2026”<\/span><\/p>\n

[…] As the great Bill Hicks used to chant: \u201cYou are free, America, to do as we tell you!\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Moments after Guillen made his pro-Castro remarks, Miami exploded. Metaphorically<\/em>, of course\u2014not like the commercial airliner that was actually<\/em> blown out of the sky in 1976 by U.S.-supported anti-Castro terrorists, killing 73 men, women, and children\u2014an act of unspeakable mass murder (much admired by Al-Qeada) whose masterminds were pardoned by George W. Bush. One of these terrorists, Orlando Bosch, walks the streets of Miami today, openly gloating about his slaughter on international TV.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oh, but it\u2019s not Orlando Bosch, CIA-backed mass-murderer, who deserves our censure; it\u2019s Ozzie Guillen, manager of the Florida Marlins.<\/span><\/p>\n

And why? Well, \u201cyou have to understand<\/em>,\u201d said a dim-witted Florida sportswriter named Dan LeBatard on ESPN yesterday\u2014\u201cCastro is our Hitler.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOur Hitler.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Castro.<\/span><\/p>\n

Not the real<\/em> mini-Hitler he overthrew\u2014Fulgencio Batista, who ran Cuba as a wonderland of torture and a whorehouse for rich Americans\u2014but Castro.<\/span><\/p>\n

And so, because he committed a Major League Thought-Crime by expressing a verboten<\/em> opinion about \u201cour Hitler,\u201d a baseball manager is ordered not only to apologize, but to lie about what he truly believes in order to keep his job.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou are free, America, to do as we tell you!\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Source<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by JOHN ESKOW \u201cYou are Free, America, to Do as We Tell You!\u201d What a pitiful spectacle. Ozzie Guillen, the hard-partying eccentric who manages the..<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,21,97],"tags":[320,229,197,348,354,350,351],"class_list":["post-11875","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-international","category-us-news","tag-cuba","tag-economic-exploitation","tag-imperialism","tag-revolutionary-history","tag-sports","tag-united-states-history","tag-world-history"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/redphoenix.news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/la-sp-sn-ozzie-guillen-20120410-001_11875_c10b0.jpg?fit=580%2C427&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redphoenix.news\/es\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}